Creation

Shake back your hair, O red-headed girl.

Let go your laughter and keep your two proud freckles on your chin.

Somewhere is a man looking for a red-headed girl and some day maybe he will look into your eyes for a restaurant cashier and find a lover, maybe.

-- Carl Sandburg, Smoke & Steel

Joy

She was happy and funny and all that one could look for in a sixteen-year-old girl. Her red hair was never tidy; her grin was not perfect but always apparent. And she always ran and stopped and said hello when she passed him in the halls.

She was all that he was not; she spoke some French merrily to her myriad of friends in the hall; she made the teachers smile and pet her and give her high marks.

She was a plump, freckled, red-haired girl, and though she was as merry as a Muggle pixie, he could not help but see residues of sadness in those grey-green eyes.

He in all his pale Roman beauty was the avenging silent angel to this swirl of exploding joyousness. His grey eyes did not tell her anything; his murmurs of Latin were not spoken to any but his parents, and the teachers did not love him.

He did not know why this dizzy swirl of sixteen-year-old happy imperfection attracted him so; his parents would never approve of imperfection.

He was the perfect darkness, she the imperfect light of the sun.

He saw her for moments that seemed to last forever, moments that would come back to haunt him before he fell asleep.

She would throw her arms around him in his dreams, laugh into his skin, her plump arms holding him tight, tighter and her lips meeting his in a burst of poppies and sunlight.

So when he found her sobbing in the hallway, what could he do but kiss her?

Damnation

Life isn't fair.

Damn the God her family so fervently believes in, damn it all.

Her mother is a vegetable in St. Mungo's; their God had damned them already, hasn't he?

But the white angel (or was he a devil? she could never be sure) boy finds her and presses his cool firm lips onto her soft ones; the curses she mutters are lost in the rush of lips; the hands upon her skin whisper prayers unlike those her mother has whispered in her piousness.

She is damned; she is swirling in the fires of hell that this white angel had brought upon her. And she does not care; he is in her and all is cold and eternally burning and the pleasure is in the knowing that she is damned.

This devil-angel has taken her body; she has given it to him.

She is damned, but if her life is a hell on earth -

How much worse can damnation be?

Normalcy

Molly Nelson.

Such a normal name; it is like a tattoo on her soul, contorting her spirit into some semblance of normalcy.

She hates the normalcy, tries so hard to avoid it. She is pure, unadulterated. She is herself.

But the white-devil angel that is Lucius has torn her normalcy; her joy at living has been ripped to shreds by his long, slender, oh-so-careful fingers.

Her friends see her tear-filled-eyes and ask her if she's ill.

If only they knew.

Conquered

She is hard put to run through the corridors like some Olympic racer, skipping to a Muggle song and crying out absurd phrases in languages she barely knows.

"Vini, vidi, vici," he murmurs, coming behind her.

When she turns, she knows without asking what he means.

He came, he saw, and he conquered.

But she smiles like the almost-slave that she has become and takes his hand, leading him, running through the hallways so that he is almost late for Transfiguration.

Barely listening to the squeaking of her Charms professor, she thinks of the white hands upon her skin and wonders how he treats his conquered.

Arthur Weasley meets her eyes for just a moment and she has a feeling of almost imperceptible freedom.

But she has seen the black mark upon Lucius' arm.

It tells her differently.

Fading

They kiss in dark corridors.

The kisses are hard and she can feel no joy in his mouth.

Her hands in his hair are joyous; his hair is almost-silk and her hands delight at its touch. But soon they are occupied elsewhere and it is all hard and painful and yet ecstatic and she will never be the pure little girl with pigtails she was, no, never.

She can almost feel her freckles fading into her skin as he lies on top of her.